


when you see him, look him in the eye

by penhaligon



Series: Watcher Hakona [1]
Category: Pillars of Eternity
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-27
Updated: 2020-02-27
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:34:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22924165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/penhaligon/pseuds/penhaligon
Summary: Death follows at the Watcher's heels like a shadow.
Relationships: Magran & The Watcher, Rymrgand & The Watcher
Series: Watcher Hakona [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1647820
Comments: 6
Kudos: 11





	when you see him, look him in the eye

**Author's Note:**

> [Watcher Hakona](https://adraveins.tumblr.com/tagged/watcher%20hakona), (half-) Glamfellen fire godlike, Bleak Walker, and hunter from the White that Wends.
> 
> Title is from [Exxus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7UsQIx14CE) by Glass Animals.

Your mother doesn't talk much about the clan. She doesn't talk much about her people at all, and you don't think of them as _your_ people. They come, once, about two decades too late, when you are just starting to grow into your limbs enough to properly hold a bow. They come to trade in times that are getting harder and harder, Nandhir says, but they come to her too, and talk about things that you don't quite understand. You know that they are asking her to return. You know that they look at you and see something dangerous, and you see your fire reflected in their wary glances.

You bare your teeth at them, like the rictus that had been fixed on Iqida's dead bear when she'd dragged it in, because your mother is too soft to tell them to back off. Energy rushes beneath your skin with it, and the fire in their eyes flares.

They don't come back. Nandhir only chuckles and pats your shoulder.

The clan, the Glamfellen, are not your people. Instead, you grow up among the assortment that dares to survive in the jaws of the White that Wends. The inhabitants call the settlement Tide's End, because here, on the edge of the Land, Ondra's domain ends and Rymrgand's begins. Here, where the floes and icebergs give way to the shelf, where ships can chart a narrow passage to trade and explore and hide, if they dare, you and your mother make your home.

The ever-shifting population of Tide's End doesn't look at you with fear or mistrust. They see your fire, and they know it for what it is -- life, and the blessings of a better god who has found her way into Rymrgand's domain. You aren't capable of feeling the cold, and your mother, too, carries her own Glamfellen-born resistance to its icy touch, but the folk and the dwarves, the aumaua and other elves and occasional orlans, have no such protection. Neither do they last as long as you and Nandhir do.

Some simply give up and leave, braving the grasp of the Land to trade or sate curiosity or flee something else, only to come to the understanding that the place they left behind is far less likely to swallow them whole. Some age quickly, and over the years, the other children that you see in the settlement are few and far between, and grow faster than you, ice streams to a slow-moving glacier. And some in Tide's End die, for reasons too numerous to count.

You don't truly understand how sudden, how cruel, how pointless it often is, until you find Dalen frozen to death not far from the settlement one day, after the storm has retreated, and it turns out that he just didn't make it back in time.

He'd been a butcher, taking the hunts that you'd started bringing in and making them last. He'd even begun to teach you how to do it on your own, and had never asked for payment that Nandhir couldn't afford. He'd only ever asked you to keep his furnaces lit and to share some of your game. When his body is extracted from the ice and brought back to the settlement, you clutch the book he'd given you on Magranic benedictions -- something from his homeland far away, where the air is warmer and green things grow and folk are numerous -- and seek out Iqida.

The boreal dwarf shakes her head. "It happens," she says, and she narrows her eyes at you. "You know the Land, Red."

"But," you say, and you don't know how to put it into words, the insistent feeling in your throat that it isn't _right_ , "he didn't do anything. He was... he was _outside_. For a few minutes."

"And Rymrgand doesn't care what's deserved and what isn't," Iqida says. Now she shakes her head at you, in that way she does when you interpret her lessons in particularly stubborn ways. "That's what we have to accept, when we come to the White. You _know_ this."

It isn't right. It isn't right, that this land and its cursed god can take whatever they want, whenever they want, and you start to wonder why anyone would ever come to the Land in the first place. Eking out a life on its shores is all you know, but you've heard Dalen's stories, and others, from traders and adventurers and refugees. You know that there is _more_ , in other parts of the world, other gods that value survival and perseverance, other shores that allow for more than this tenuous existence.

You seek out your mother afterwards, and Nandhir hugs you and makes sure that you eat. But you only stare down at the meal for a long while, a slow-mounting anger starting to burn in your chest. You aren't sure what you're angry about, only that flames crackle and crawl down the cracks in your soapstone skin, accidentally singing the table.

It bothers you, then, that you'd never asked why Dalen had left his homeland and come here, of all places.

* * *

You ask Iqida later, why she left Naasitaq, but she just laughs and avoids the question and takes you out on a hunt. Without a standing butcher, it becomes harder to preserve the precious meat that the hunters of Tide's End bring in, and preservation means that there is less food going bad too quickly and therefore less hunting. But enough people had spent enough time with Dalen that everyone pools together what they know, and a young aumaua woman takes over the bulk of it.

And that is how life flows in Tide's End. Kith come and go, lost to departure and age and premature death, and when a need arises, other kith step in to fill in the gaps. Iqida teaches you to hunt, until you outstrip nearly every other hunter in the settlement, even with the bright orange-red flames of your hair that spook half the scant birds and bears and wolves that you come across. Sometimes marauders come through, but you learn that your fire scares them too, and some in Tide's End see you as a blessing from Magran herself, bestowing her good will upon the most stable trading post on this side of the White.

Sometimes other Glamfellen come through, to trade or preach or even skirmish, but you scoff at the words of jommydra and keep them away from your mother. You learn to speak and read fluent Aedyran, and some Vailian too, so that you can lay claim to anything that comes through Tide's End and speaks of the gods, whether that's books and pamphlets or conversations with devout traders.

From that, you learn about Magran and Galawain, and you take the idea of them with you when you hunt. Times get harder and leaner, and animal life at the borders of the Land is always scarce, and you venture farther and farther into and across the ice sheet. It is always dangerous, and always hard, but you push yourself, with Magranic words ringing in your ears louder than the howling wind and groaning ice. 

_Take heart in thine own strength. Take comfort in thine own power. Take control of thine own path._

The louder those words are in your ears, and the more you embrace them, the more the Land howls and seethes with things that begin to feel like omens.

Ephemeral animal life isn't the only thing that wanders the ice. Sometimes kith from other parts of the world come as interlopers, as raiders, and some Glamfellen take to that way of life as well. In many ways, the possibility of encountering a band of marauders while out hunting alone is more dangerous than anything in the Land, the active malice of other kith a more serious threat than the cold indifference of a frigid wild, and so you are careful to keep an eye out for the telltale signs of passage, for the glimpse of figures on the horizon when the horizon is visible.

And once, when you miss signs erased by wind and snow, when you encounter a raiding band far too close and know that you are caught, when you ready yourself for a fight that you might not be able to win, the ice cracks open instead.

It splits like it is wont to do closer to the coast, where the shelf breaks into jagged floes under the pressure of wind and water and its own weight. A tremendous sound like the snap of brittle bone and the groan of a glacier shivers through the air and under your feet, and the ice sheet beneath the approaching raiders opens like the teeth of a hungry mouth. The raiders fall, their panicked cries rising and silencing in quick succession as the black hollow of nothing, of whatever lies underneath the ice sheet of the Land, devours them whole.

None of the raiders are left, when the pause comes, and you are left with the wind's constant, mournful whistling, with the low and eternal grumble of ice. You have the odd, fleeting thought that the Land had actually _helped_ you, and then the snapping sound comes again, and the crack _spreads_ , quickly and violently, thin fingers of nothing webbing out towards you next and dragging the mouth into a grotesquely elongated shape.

You run. It is the only thing that you can do.

But it isn't the only omen that hounds your footsteps. You come back from an unsuccessful hunt one day, smarting at the failure and, for once, cursing the hot flames that burn through you, because of the way they make you all too visible across the open stretches of the ice sheet on a clear day. But the sight waiting for you at the gates of Tide's End stops you in your tracks, a rushing howl starting to build in your ears that has nothing to do with the wind picking up around you.

A dead white hare lies in front of the gate, flecked through with rot and maggots. Its one visible eye stares at you, exposed and swollen.

You burn it, then and there, and you go back out into the Land and stay there until you bring a kill back with you.

Dalen isn't the only person you find frozen to death, either. Sometimes you find bodies out in the ice and snow, thawed out at warmer times of the year or in the process of being encased in ice. Nameless strangers caught in Rymrgand's bad luck, and you burn them too, as if that will cleanse you and them of all traces of such a hateful god. Others you find as unfortunate victims of marauders or animal attacks, and some are kith you know, unlucky enough to be caught outside of the walls of Tide's End.

It starts to feel like you are being pursued by some ill intent, some shadow of death, and it is never so apparent as when Iqida comes back with a festering and fatal wound.

She's far too old to be hunting now, but sometimes she still goes out, because Tide's End can use every hunter it can get, and it's the leanest year on record. Some of the wall guards are helping her to limp towards the local priest of Berath's cabin when you catch up to them at a run, and it only takes a look for you to know that something is deeply, deeply wrong.

"Polar bear," Iqida grunts, as the priest sets to work. "The biggest I've seen in a while." Her voice is labored and failing, and you watch with an awful, tight twisting of your throat as the priest frowns over the wound, as the healing light fades away before the priest tries again. "It was... sick? I don't know. It wasn't a normal bear. It got lucky and, well..." Iqida gestures to the wound slashed across her side. She watches as the priest fails to heal her -- something that should _not_ happen -- and a grim acceptance settles into her features. "Might be it for me."

"No," you say, and you are hardly aware that Nandhir has entered, that your mother brushes a hand across your back and then takes Iqida's hand, her face drawn and concerned.

Iqida gives you a wry look. "I'm getting on in years, you know," she says, and she waves the priest away, when the woman makes a third attempt that fails just like the other two. The priest nods with the same calm acceptance and steps back, because that's what Berathian priests do, and it isn't _right_. Iqida gestures to the wound again. "I might be a little too old for something like this to just go away."

"No," you say again, cold and fierce, because it isn't just that Iqida is old with a body that doesn't heal like it used to. You've seen sick animals before, diseased and rotting and always where they shouldn't be, and you _know_ what this is, why the wound keeps festering even under the pressure of the divine. You aren't aware of burning hot as a furnace, until Nandhir takes a step back.

Your mother reaches out a placating hand towards you, and you can't stand the look in her eyes, the grief, the softness, the desire to comfort you. "Hakona," she says quietly.

You pull away and storm out of the cabin, to retrieve your bow and an axe for good measure, and you head out into the Land.

* * *

The trail isn't difficult to follow. Iqida had bled all the way back, and the sight of red on white makes the edges of your vision turn the same scarlet color, as flames lick and crackle around your head. The wind howls, and the ice sheet groans, and you hardly hear it past the pounding in your ears. Daylight still burns, but a strange, shadowy quality overtakes it, like the light is being filtered through nonexistent dark clouds. But the sky is an endless, unbroken blue, of the kind that hurts to look at, and the ice and snow glare bright white all around you, broken only by the red trail of blood that you follow.

When you reach the spot where you know the fight must have gone down, you find nothing but more blood and a few broken splinters of arrows, and footsteps fast being eroded. They tell the tale of Iqida's boots only -- no marks of bear claws anywhere, either at the scene or leading away. You stand there next to a frozen pool of Iqida's blood, and you make sure to hold your bow carefully, so that the flames now licking furiously across your gray skin don't accidentally set it alight.

"Where are you?" you shout, to the empty white expanse and the achingly blue sky, to the wind screaming in your ears. "I know what you are! Come and get _me_ , if you want a fight!"

The air gets darker, even though the sky is just as bright, and it leaves you with a sense of vertigo rippling behind your eyes and under your skull. You turn this way and that, your eyes sweeping the wide, wide horizon, and you swallow past the sick, swelling vertigo as you look back the way you came.

Nothing is there. Nothing follows you. Your shouts echo hollowly against nothing at all before they're swallowed by the snatching wind.

You turn back around, and then you see it, standing where it wasn't before.

The distance that separates you from the aurochs is half the length of Tide's End, at least, and yet you can see its every detail clearly, even through the swirling vortex of wind and snow that circles it in an endless turning. It stands on two legs, towering above the ice sheet, as tall as an iceberg is deep. Its white fur is matted and ragged, covering an emaciated body crawling with the same disease that you've seen in sick and dead animals across the Land. The air hums, static and groaning both, and bone-white eyes gaze at you across the distance, backlit by sunlight that is somehow too bright and tinted painfully dark at the same time.

It is not often that you are afraid, these days. You've outlived every challenge of the Land, and every omen that has haunted your steps has only made you more determined to do so.

But you look at the aurochs and feel it look upon you in turn, under the warped light of day and surrounded by the static of the air, and your skin crawls, and your stomach clenches. Your bow nearly slips from numb fingers.

The fire still licks through the cracks in your skin, however, and you force yourself to pay attention to its heat, to the feel of its power burning within you. It is a familiar sensation that has been with you since birth, and it steadies you enough for your throat to work again. "Well?" you say through gritted teeth, clutching your fingers so tightly around your bow that the wood groans. "What are you waiting for?"

Iqida had told you her people's stories of the Beast of Winter, and tales had come floating through Tide's End too. None of them had delivered accounts of survival or triumph. Only of death's inexorable march forward, of the stillness that followed, of Rymrgand's terrible, implacable nature.

You don't know what you hope to achieve. You know only that you are smoldering with fury, with the dread of looking over your shoulder, and if this _thing_ is coming for you, you will not go down easy.

The Beast takes a step forward, and the ice beneath it cracks like shattering glass, though it does not give way. You swallow, then shoulder the bow and draw forth your axe instead, and the Beast takes another step. The ice beneath your feet shakes, the air itself trembling with the thing's approach, and you flex your fingers around the handle of the axe. You hold it at your side, at the ready, and even though you know it will be a losing fight, you reach deep to the fire blazing at the core of who you are.

Magran's fire, which had helped you to keep Tide's End safe and keep the settlement's fires burning, which had burned the omens haunting you, which had gifted you with warmth in a cold wasteland, which your once-people had looked upon with such mistrust.

_Let the fire guide you. Let the fire transform you._

The words are an old comfort too, one of your first encounters with Magranic teachings. You repeat them to yourself as the Beast takes another quaking step, then another, and you will yourself to _burn_.

_Let the fire purify you. Let the fire consume you._

The edges of your vision, red with fury, with fire, begin to warp and change, and for a moment, you think the vertigo is overtaking you at last, as a ringing chime clangs, dizzying, in your ears. But all you feel is an even greater heat, and all you see is the endless blue of the sky, the way it bears down on the white expanse below. You see _blue_ , burning so hot that anyone in too close a proximity would catch, and the cracks in your soapstone skin glow with it.

Fear falls away, and fervor replaces it. Strength flows through your limbs, and your fingers flex around the axe again, hungry and ready.

The Beast pauses, and the screaming vortex of wind and snow wavers around it.

You glare across the distance that separates you still, and you _want_ it to come. But you remember other words, _seek not to clash_ , and you remain still in turn. "I do not," you say, certain and steady even though the Beast of Winter has come for you, and your voice echoes across the blindingly blue-white ice, " _belong_ to you."

The blue flames crackle at the edges of your vision and dance down your arms, singing cloth and leather where they brush against your clothes. The Beast stares at you with its too-white eyes, odious and unblinking, but it does not move any closer. For a moment, it's as if that is all there is in the world: you burning white hot, and the Beast of Winter standing poised and colossal above cracked ice, and the mournful gnawing wind, and the vast blue sky, and the too-dark light, and the ice, always the endless, eternal ice.

A growl ripples through the air, seeming to emanate from the Beast but also from something impossibly, unthinkably deeper, and when you blink, the aurochs is gone.

For a moment, you stand perfectly still, your thoughts suspended in shock and wonder and giddy triumph, blue still rippling bright and hungry at the edges of your sight. Something nameless shudders through you, and a sense of satisfaction that seems distinct from you wells up inside of you. The blue retreats, giving way to familiar orange-red, and with the return of your regular fire comes a darkening of your vision.

Your last thought, before consciousness slips away from you, rings out just as distinct: _Well done._

* * *

When you return to Tide's End, Iqida is dead. You remember having some feverish thought of killing the thing that had hurt her, as if that might have lifted whatever curse it had laid, but it seems like an age and a half ago. Your fury, your fight, even your grief seems distant, numbed. Nandhir catches you in her arms and pulls you close as soon as you enter the priest's cabin, and for once, you don't pull away.

"She knew you had gone to kill it," your mother whispers, her voice trembling with grief held firmly at bay. "Did you?"

The triumph of before seems just as long ago and far away. You swallow and feel much smaller than you had out there in the cold. You can hardly even see the light of your flames glistening off of the imported wood of the walls, and only the faintest shadow of antler-shaped horns. "I--" you say, and you have to start again. "I couldn't find it."

You'd won something, certainly. But not Iqida's life back. Not even vengeance.

Nandhir's arms tighten around you. "That's alright," she says. "She knew."

And it finally occurs to you, in a hollow, sinking way that you remember with icy clarity for the rest of your life, that Iqida had died without you.

Life goes on, somehow, as it always does in the Land, aggressively carving out existence in a place that strives to see it end. You see less omens, in the years after, though they never retreat completely. When you hunt on a clear day, your blue flames make it easier to blend in with the ice and snow, and you learn to call on them at will without draining yourself to the point of passing out.

Your mother has another child, a little sister named Akhala, and brings Akhala's father, another clan-less Glamfellen, into your home. For the first time, you wonder about your Sceltrfolc father, if that, too, had anything to do with why the clan had treated your mother as they had. But you don't wonder about it long, and you hunt for yourself and your mother and Akhala and her father and Tide's End too, and you remember to thank Galawain when you do. And when Akhala's father disappears one day, never to be seen again and almost certainly swallowed up by the Land like so many before him, you take it as another omen and adapt, as you always do.

You keep a shrine to Magran in the little house in which you and Nandhir and Akhala live, and you feel her sometimes, out in the depths of the Land.

Magran does not protect you. That is not her way.

But she gives you fire, and you protect yourself.


End file.
